a little. Such it was in the last calm year of plenty, 1913.
A calm year of plenty. But one chronic and dreary malady: that of
the odd women. Why, in the name of all prosperity, should every
class but the lowest in such a society hang overburdened with Dead
Sea fruit of odd women, unmarried, unmarriageable women, called old
maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every school-master, every
bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more
old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower
middle-classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower
middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus
leaving their true partners stranded? Or are middle-class women very
squeamish in their choice of husbands?
However it be, it is a tragedy. Or perhaps it is not.
Perhaps these unmarried women of the middle-classes are the famous
sexless-workers of our ant-industrial society, of which we hear so
much. Perhaps all they lack is an occupation: in short, a job. But
perhaps we might hear their own opinion, before we lay the law down.
In Woodhouse, there was a terrible crop of old maids among the
"nobs," the tradespeople and the clergy. The whole town of women,
colliers' wives and all, held its breath as it saw a chance of one
of these daughters of comfort and woe getting off. They flocked to
the well-to-do weddings with an intoxication of relief. For let
class-jealousy be what it may, a woman hates to see another woman
left stalely on the shelf, without a chance. They all _wanted_ the
middle-class girls to find husbands. Every one wanted it, including
the girls themselves. Hence the dismalness.
Now James Houghton had only one child: his daughter Alvina. Surely
Alvina Houghton--
But let us retreat to the early eighties, when Alvina was a baby: or
even further back, to the palmy days of James Houghton. In his palmy
days, James Houghton was _crême de la crême_ of Woodhouse society.
The house of Houghton had always been well-to-do: tradespeople, we
must admit; but after a few generations of affluence, tradespeople
acquire a distinct _cachet_. Now James Houghton, at the age of
twenty-eight, inherited a splendid business in Manchester goods, in
Woodhouse. He was a tall, thin, elegant young man with side-whiskers,
genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for
elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity:
a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full
of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful.
Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older
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